Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), in his 1979 book “Broca’s Brain” and the Cosmos television mini-series in 1980. Sagan was drawing on previous use of the concept by Marcello Truzzi in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Simon LaPlace in the early 1800s, and ultimately by philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “On Miracles”.
“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”
Carl Sagan, 1979
Carl Sagan, 1979
To make sense of the aphorism, we should first ask what qualifies as an extraordinary claim. There are three classes of extraordinary claims:
- Statistically improbable claims.
- Claims outside the range of prior experience, with unknown probability.
- Claims contrary to the body of established scientific knowledge or preponderance of existing evidence.
“What is a miracle?”
“A miracle is something that happens contrawise to the will of nature.”
Source is forgotten, likely to be Robert Heinlein or A.C. Clarke
Social scientist Marcello Truzzi, who founded an organization to investigate paranormal claims, coined a similar wording of the ECREE aphorism that Sagan later used. In 1978, Truzzi wrote, “extraordinariness must be measured against theoretical expectations provided by the general body of scientific knowledge at the time...claims require extraordinary evidence if they entail the falsehood of established scientific results that are themselves extensively tested and well understood.... A black swan is one thing; a swan that visits you from beyond the grave is something else.”
Religious Claims
Let’s try to summarize religious and spiritual claims. It won’t be easy. There are about 3000 distinct religions followed by some group of people, now or in the past. From this variety, it may be difficult to compile a simple list of religious claims, but I will try, using parallel ideas in a number of religions.
God and Gods, each having many of the following characteristics:
Non-corporeal, invisible, silent spirits.
Immortal.
Capable of magic or miracles.
Interested in humanity.
Intervening in human affairs.
Responsible for creation of the world, or parts thereof.
Often engaged in conflict with other gods, spirits, or beings.
Protecting humans from evil spirits, people or natural disasters, often in exchange for worship.
All-powerful.
All-knowing.
All-good. (In some traditions, not all.)
Divine Creation of the World
Creation of the universe or world by gods or other spiritual beings.
Creation of the living world.
Distinct creation of people, separately and above the living world, and endowment of people with sentience, knowledge or wisdom.
Creation of the spiritual realm, of heaven and hell.
Sacred Gifts
Gifts of knowledge or other gifts to humanity, including positive and negative gifts.
Immortal Souls
Spiritual, immortal extension of the human self, capable of existing without the body after death.
Includes self-awareness, memory, will, thoughts and emotions.
Generally believed to travel to non-material spiritual places after death -- Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Valhalla, Folkvangr, the seven Samaawat, Alma d-Nhura, Deva Loka, Narka Loka, etc.
Human Spirits
Ghosts existing after life in the physical world (but not necessarily immortal). May include malevolent spirits.
Divine Superior Beings
Demi-gods, including Jesus, Maui, and Heracles, and divine relatives, including the Virgin Mary. Often considered the offspring of god or gods, sometimes through parthenogenesis, sometimes the offspring of humans and gods. Often believed to have a previous physical life, but currently are non-corporeal spirits. Prayer for intercession is often directed toward divine superior beings rather than to God.
Spiritual Superior Beings
Angels, demons, animal or natural spirits with greater magical power than humans or human spirits.
May include antagonistic spirits such as Satan.
Afterlife Places
Heaven, limbo and hell. Places without a physical presence or contact with the physical world, where one can meet people from one's former life.
Miracles
Extraordinary events, contrary to expected behavior of natural systems, generally for the benefit of people experiencing difficulty.
Divine Causation
Routine natural events, seasons, tides, eclipses.
Routine human events, birth, death.
Movement of heavenly bodies.
Extraordinary events as reward or punishment (usually punishment), including natural disasters, virgin birth, ascension to heaven.
Natural Spirits
Attribution of living identity, will or sentience to animals, plants, places and objects; anthropomorphism of nature.
Sacred Places
Attribution of sacred living identity to mountains, rivers, and lands. Sacred objects and places are believed to enable religious miracles.
Spiritual Inanimate Objects and Places
Religious icons, relics of saints, churches, temples, springs and objects or places believed to have magical powers or enable miracles.
Reincarnation
The belief that souls are recycled into new people or animals. Some religions attribute a “leveling-up” process of attaining higher or lower status according to moral behavior during life.
Divination and Prophecy
Belief that the future can be determined by religious ritual or by religiously endowed individuals.
Saints and Spiritual Intermediaries
Belief that the spirits of sacred humans can intervene and influence God’s actions, or parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions.
Sacred Texts
Belief that the Bible, Devi Bhagavatam, Quran, Book of Mormon or other sacred texts are divinely inspired, contain divine revelation, are literally true, and have an absolute obligation to be obeyed.
Prayer
The belief that humans can communicate with gods and higher beings, to give thanks and ask for divine help.
Ancestor Worship
Belief that deceased ancestors actively intervene and protect their descendants.
Human Religious Intermediaries Priests, Pastors, Popes, and Shamen
Belief that special humans possess magical powers or can intervene to influence divine action.
Divine Humans
Egyptian, Roman and Japanese societies held that their leaders were gods, or became gods when assuming office as emperor or pharaoh. Chinese and other cultures believed that their leaders were semi-divine descendants of gods.
Belief in Transcendent Reality, and/or denial of physical reality.
Belief that physical reality is corrupt and is superseded by a transcendent reality.
Karma
Belief that good or bad actions have real-world consequences in luck or future events.
Ordinary Scientific Evidence
The scientific method systemized the search for truth and standardized the criteria for truth, beginning in the 17th century. Scientific evidence involves the following elements.
- Empirical observation.
- Identification of processes and developing hypotheses about processes.
- Experiments designed to fulfill predictions or invalidate the hypotheses.
- Clarity of data from experiment.
- Repeatability.
- Relevance of evidence, often measured by statistical tests.
- Peer review and publication.
In general, religious claims fail most or all of the standards for scientific truth (or as it is otherwise known, truth). Stories of 14th century BCE conversations with a burning bush or visions by a 15th-century French girl do not qualify as evidence.
Moses and the Burning Bush, Holman Bible, 1890
Vision of Joan of Arc (1428), artist and date unknown to me.
With religious claims, there are few repeatable observations with objective observers. There are no identified processes. There are no experiments to invalidate the claims. There is little clarity of the data. There is often little relevance of the evidence, and little critique of the claims. We see that religious claims fail to meet standards for ordinary evidence before even considering the need for extraordinary evidence,
Why Are Religious Claims Extraordinary Claims?
Religious claims are extraordinary claims because they violate known scientific knowledge about processes. The list of religious claims is too long for a complete rebuttal, but fall into four general categories. First are claims involving spirits, second are claims involving higher classes of beings, third are claims involving miracles and fourth are claims of future knowledge or predestination.
Spirits represent disembodied beings, with self-awareness, memory, will, ability to communicate and other powers. But scientific knowledge places the seat of sentience in the brain. Through observation of patients with brain injuries (as described well in the books by Oliver Sachs) we know which parts of the brain enable these aspects of sentience. We can observe patients in which memory, will and communication are gone, and have established that the brain performs those functions of humanity. Without a physical brain, spirits cannot have sentience; souls cannot persist after death. To claim otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
The same reasoning applies to the existence of higher beings, gods, demi-gods, angels and demons that are believed to exist in the spiritual world. Without a brain, how do they think? How do they persist as self-aware entities? To claim that an angel or demon possesses sentience without a brain violates our scientific understanding of sentience.
Religious claims of miracles and magic are also extraordinary claims. We know how physics, chemistry, and life sciences work. A miraculous event, by definition, is contrary to the expectations from those natural processes. As such, every miracle or magical claim requires extraordinary evidence.
Claims of prophecy and predestination violate the scientific understanding of time. In all well-documented experience, information can not flow backwards through time. Future events are fundamentally uncertain, despite high precision in prior conditions and known processes.
Extraordinary Evidence
What is extraordinary evidence, as compared to the normal scientific evidence described above?
I return to David Hume, who first established the ECREE standard in 1748. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.
In essence evidence of a miraculous event must be strong enough to invalidate the scientific knowledge precluding that event. To be considered true, a miracle involving levitation must be supported by evidence sufficient to invalidate our well-established notions about gravity. To be considered true, the claim of a soul, ghost or spirit must demonstrate disembodied sentience in some unquestionable, observable, repeatable form. The claim that God exists needs to be demonstrated by apparently unlimited power – perhaps by moving thousands of galaxies overnight to spell out, “I am God” in every language on earth. Of course, none of those things have ever happened or ever will happen.
Conclusion
Religious claims are extraordinary claims, defying our existing body of scientific knowledge. Religious claims fail to meet even the lowest standards of scientific evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence required for such claims to be regarded as truth.
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Afterword
Non-Religious Paranormal Beliefs
There are also a substantial number of non-religious paranormal beliefs, some of which overlap with religious beliefs. Some (telekinesis, telepathy, extraterrestrial visitors) do not involve spiritual elements, while others (ghosts) do not involve higher spiritual powers. These also require extraordinary evidence, but are irrelevant to the discussion of atheism.
Non-Interventionist God
Albert Einstein said, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist... I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings” The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) framed a special case of the non-interventionist God. Spinoza held to a physical sense of reality, but viewed all of creation as a sub-set of God. According to commentator Paul So, Spinoza “rejected the existence of Soul, Angels, Demons, Miracles, Divine Creationism, the possibility of Afterlife, Divine Revelation, validity of Prophecy, Biblical literalism, Tradition, Scriptural authority, and last but not least the existence of a personal God.”
Giordano Bruno in the 16th century rejected many of these same religious claims, while introducing revolutionary speculative cosmological ideas that are today held as true. He speculated that stars were far-away suns, that planets might orbit those suns, and that intelligent beings might live there. He also made contributions to the study of memory, mathematics, geometry and language. Bruno may have been approaching the rationalist’s idea of a non-interventionist God, but was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.
Execution of Giardano Bruno, source unknown to me.Spinoza’s non-interventionist God eliminates most, but not all, of the unsupported religious claims. Spinoza’s God presumes that God is the creator; that God is reality, and that God is greater than reality. These claims are also unsupported by evidence.
Baruch Spinoza, 1632 - 1677.
